EarthServer: the Global Datacube Federation

Publication date:

19 April, 2016

Authors/Presenters:

Baumann, P.

Medium / Event:

EGU General Assembly 2016

One of today's most influential initiatives in Big Geo Data is EarthServer which is paving the way for flexible, scalable datacube services based on innovative NewSQL technology. Researchers from Europe, the US and recently Australia have teamed up to rigorously materialize the datacube paradigm for Earth Observation, ocean, meteorological, and planetary science.

The platform technology, rasdaman, enables ad-hoc datacube analytics and fusion. Integrated metadata / datacube retrieval is under preparation. Relying on the OGC Big Geo Data standards, WCS and WCPS, "any question, anytime, on any size" becomes possible from open-source tools like OpenLayers, ncWMS, QGIS and proprietary tools like ESRI ArcGIS. NASA WorldWind adds high-endvisualization. EarthServer databases have transceded 100 TB and are currently heading towards the Petabyte frontier. Single queries have been split automatically across more than 1,000 cloud nodes.

In this meeting, EarthServer will be presented live: its vision, technology, existing services, and its impact on Big Datacube standards. Questions will be answered like "why is it advantageous for our data center join the federation?", "how can we do it, and how much effort is needed?".

What if geodata were available for download on the web – what would the next step be, what do users need then? The answer is: ad-hoc analysis using any terminal device, utilising the geodata provider’s server capacity.
This is the objective of the Earthserver project, which relies solely on open standards in order to provide scalable services for multi - dimensional data of all Earth sciences field.